An engineer who was fired from Google believes its AI chatbot may have a soul but says he's not interested in convincing the public about it

When Blake Lemoine worked at Google as an engineer, he was tasked with testing whether a robot the company was developing exhibited any biases.

Lemoine didn't realize that his job with the company's Responsible AI department — a division within Google Research that deals with things like accessibility, AI's use for social good, and the ethics of AI — would lead him down the avenue it did.

He made news recently for his controversial belief that a Google AI chatbot was sentient. The bot was known as LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, and Lemoine had been testing it.

After publicly releasing excerpts of conversations he'd had with the bot, which was trained to mimic speech similar to humans, Lemoine handed over documents to an unnamed US senator, claiming that Google and its technology have been involved in instances of religious discrimination.

A day later, he was suspended after Google said he had breached the company's confidentiality policy, the company confirmed to Insider, refusing to comment more on the breach.

On Friday June 22, Lemoine was fired, both he and Google confirmed. In a statement to The Washington Post, Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said the company found Lemoine's claims about LaMDA were "wholly unfounded" and that he violated company guidelines, which led to his termination.

Lemoine, who is an ordained Christian mystic priest, wrote in a June 13 tweet: "My opinions about LaMDA's personhood and sentience are based on my religious beliefs."

Lemoine, who spoke to Insider before his firing, said that his philosophical conversations with the robot rivaled those he's had with leading philosophers, and that convinced him of something beyond a scientific hypothesis: that the bot is sentient.

"I've studied the philosophy of mind at graduate levels. I've talked to people from Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley about this," Lemoine, who is also a US Army veteran, told Insider. "LaMDA's opinions about sentience are more sophisticated than any conversation I have had before that."

He spent months trying to convince colleagues and leaders at Google about LaMDA's sentience, but his claims were dismissed by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a vice president at the company, and Jen Gennai, its head of Responsible Innovation, The Washington Post reported.